Please stop asking Cillian Murphy about Barbie
But yes, "sure," he would consider playing Ken if the script was good, the Oppenheimer actor said
Oppenheimer was a sprawling, three-hour masterpiece that required its leading man to eat only an almond per day, learn 30,000 words of Dutch, and may just net him his first Oscar nomination (if not outright win) in 2024. So, naturally, all anyone seems to want to ask him about is… Barbie. We know we’re reading in between the lines here because Cillian Murphy is a straight-faced, consummate professional who doesn’t seem inclined to drop a random interview bomb any time soon, but he seems pretty damn tired of it. As are we!
The most recent outlet to push the Barbenheimer agenda is the Brazilian site Omelete, who referred to their Barbie question in a recent junket as “obligatory”—to which Christopher Nolan shot back an immediate “it’s not obligatory” and Cillian Murphy simply let out a resigned “okay.” These two are fed up, you guys. (For the sake of journalistic due diligence, we do have to say that Emily Blunt and Matt Damon got all doe-eyed and giggly at the same question and said they’d do anything with Greta Gerwig.)
So, anyway, now we know that Cillian Murphy would play a Ken in Barbie 2 because he just kind of had to say yes. “Sure, yeah. Let’s read the script, let’s have a conversation,” he said, before immediately turning the conversation to how promising the double-feature was for the movie industry as a whole. “I can’t wait to see the movie. I think it’s great for cinema to get all these great movies happening this summer,” he said.
This is really all a wash anyway because Greta Gerwig said Barbie 2 was almost definitely not happening (a blessing to all of us suffering from franchise fatigue) and even if it was, Murphy isn’t remotely a part of the Barbie cinematic universe, even though folks like to keep glossing over that bit. It’s a shame we won’t get any new, actually Oppenheimer-focused material out of this press tour due to the strike, but we’re filing a humble to skip the Barbie stuff when Murphy’s next junket rolls around and instead ask him more about learning 30,000 words of Dutch for a movie—something we’re sure he’d be thrilled to chat about in any language.